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Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

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Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#111

Post by joatmon-snoo »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #91
alec wrote: post #75

I work for Google, but not on anything related to Meet. I'm most excited about this because the video/audio quality is much higher. When I use Zoom with friends, everyone is usually 320x240, or maybe 640x480 if there's only one person. Doom was 320x240 in 1993. In Google Meet, I usually see people at 1280x920. A 4k monitor will fit 6 people at that resolution. I value this higher resolution because it makes me feel m…

Is this the same service I'll have been using if my company has Google Suite and we've been using meet.google.com to run meetings? Asking because I've had the opposite experience - we've used Zoom for a few meetings recently and get massively better quality than we did on Meet, and I'm not sure what could be going wrong there. Or is this a new premium Meet service that's higher quality than both Meet and Zoom? Zoom a…

meet.google.com is Google Meet, yep.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#112

Post by grandinj »

grandinj wrote: post #48

I don't have the mental space to waste filling it with details of another Google communication product they are going to discontinue in a year.

Clearly other people are smarter than me. I'm not that smart, and I'm a parent, so I take quite seriously the act of choosing which stuff I need to learn to use. If you're young and smart, that probably doesn't matter, you have lots of free time to learn new things.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#113

Post by azangru »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #44
DrScump wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google still asked for a phone number Asks for , certainly. Requires was the claim. Google asks me a dozen times a day to enable Location Services. Yeah, right.

Twitter does not "require" a phone number, but they'll lock your account very quickly for "suspicious activity" if you don't provide one. I imagine Google to be similar.

Oh, that's why mine got locked! I've been wondering about that. I hadn't posted a single tweet, yet got notified that my account was locked for suspicious activity.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#114

Post by vidarh »

llarsson wrote: post #82

Ok, sorry for being dumb. Is Google Meet actually an entirely new service, or just re-branded Hangouts? When I make a calendar event and choose to add video meeting to it, it's now a Meet, when it used to be a Hangout. My experience with Hangouts (as recently as a week ago) was rather poor. Is Meet actually good/better?

I've given up trying to keep track of Google services, as odds are they will be replaced by something completely different in a year or two.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#115

Post by gregdoesit »

Can someone tell me the difference between Google Meet, Google Hangouts, Google Duo and Google Chat?

Multiple of these support video and chat. I’ve used Hangouts and Chat and Duo before. Why the new brand “Meet”? And why have competing - even more importantly - confusing products at Google who seem to offer the same features?

I would like to, but cannot be bullish on Google as a video communications platform for this reason.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#116

Post by sneak »

DrScump wrote: post #26
auscompgeek wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once attempted to create a Google account from a university (which has their own ASN), and Google still asked for a phone number.

Google still asked for a phone number Asks for , certainly. Requires was the claim. Google asks me a dozen times a day to enable Location Services. Yeah, right.

I'm not sure when the last time you checked was, but I cannot currently create new Google Accounts without providing a phone number. It is required.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#117

Post by cameronbrown »

jedberg wrote: post #94
kartayyar wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google products ( and other tech company products ) are discontinued when they don't take off. Meet has a 100 million daily call participants. And really with video conferencing product, I don't get the whole trope of "but they might discontinue it." - the utility is immediate in terms of the calls that you make with it, and time boxed till by when a call ends.

> And really with video conferencing product, I don't get the whole trope of "but they might discontinue it." - the utility is immediate in terms of the calls that you make with it, and time boxed till by when a call ends. Not true at all. I have a bunch of recurring meetings in my calendar, and each one has a Zoom link in it. If I wanted to switch to Meet, I'd have to redo each of those invites with a new link, and…

> Not true at all. I have a bunch of recurring meetings in my calendar, and each one has a Zoom link in it. If I wanted to switch to Meet, I'd have to redo each of those invites with a new link, and then hope everyone noticed the update.

If you use Google Calendar, I believe a Meet link is automatically added by default.

> They won't, so I'll spend the first few weeks individually pinging people reminding them of the new conference software, and then waiting 10 minutes for them to download, install, and configure it before joining us.

That doesn't make sense. Meet is done exclusively through the web browser.

> And then if I decide to switch back, I get to do it all over again.

What stops you from having both so you can try both? Those Zoom links aren't obsolete the moment you add a Meet link.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#118

Post by wanderingstan »

gregdoesit wrote: post #115

Can someone tell me the difference between Google Meet, Google Hangouts, Google Duo and Google Chat? Multiple of these support video and chat. I’ve used Hangouts and Chat and Duo before. Why the new brand “Meet”? And why have competing - even more importantly - confusing products at Google who seem to offer the same features? I would like to, but cannot be bullish on Google as a video communications platform for this…

Likewise. I’ve given up trying to understand the differences in feature sets, contact lists, and pricing.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#119

Post by sneak »

EGreg wrote: post #62
sneak wrote: post #12

> We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts. Reminder: it is impossible to get a Google Account without giving your phone number (and thus permitting access your traditional identity information with it: name, street address, et c) to Google, who can then tie it to any existing Google cookies and your IP. Demanding that your communications partner…

How exactly would you get the traditional identity info like the address FROM A PHONE NUMBER?

There are dozens of data brokers that aggregate bulk data from hundreds or thousands of different businesses, for millions of customers: hotels, online shops, credit card companies, loyalty programs, travel, supermarkets, movie theaters, all of it. In the US, probably 80-90% of the large organizations you've given your phone number to have sold your activity to a data broker.

These data brokers then provide all sorts of lookup APIs, using name+zip, or phone number, or email, et c. It's basically "user activity as a service", so that businesses that have acquired your email or phone number can know things like what ZIP you're in, how much you travel, what sort of things you spend money on, your income bracket, what kind of car you drive, et c. It allows them to better tailor their marketing communications to you (e.g. if you only fly first and stay in 5 star hotels, they probably shouldn't try to rent you a Camry on the hotel checkout page).

There are many of these companies, and API lookups are cheap and easy. Google itself has also been buying up purchase histories from many companies (including email addresses) so that they can link your email to your buying habits (as well as your shipping/delivery addresses).

Almost all of this is totally unregulated in the USA, and is for sale to anyone who wants to use it.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#120

Post by wanderingstan »

montroser wrote: post #110
sneak wrote: post #12

> We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts. Reminder: it is impossible to get a Google Account without giving your phone number (and thus permitting access your traditional identity information with it: name, street address, et c) to Google, who can then tie it to any existing Google cookies and your IP. Demanding that your communications partner…

We used Meet for a little while at work while looking for alternatives to zoom. The prospect of pouring more of our data into Google's coffers didn't sit well (and anyway audio quality was also sub par). Two fantastic "indie" alternatives for video conferencing at work: https://whereby.com and https://team.video

We’ve also been impressed with Jitsi.
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